Building aptitude from source code

You also can build aptitude from source; however, this is
probably not a useful exercise unless apt is already
available on your system. If it is, you can install
aptitude from source with the following steps:

Once all the required components are available, open a
terminal and execute the command tar zxf
aptitude-0.8.10.tar.gz to unpack the source
code. Once the source code is unpacked, type cd
aptitude-0.8.10 && ./configure &&
make to compile aptitude. If this succeeds,
make sure you are the root user (by using
su, for instance), then type
make install to install aptitude on
your computer. Once aptitude is successfully installed,
typing aptitude at a command prompt
should start the program.